the queen’s residence, not hitherto known, was marked down.  Then the watchers returned to their ambush outside the palace, and caught a councillor who was stealing away in the night.  Almost immediately after this gentleman had been made prisoner two fast-footed men came upon the scene.  They evidently suspected something, for they suddenly pulled up and stood listening intently.  One of them was within arm’s length of Baden-Powell.  Quietly B.-P. stood up.  The man did not move.  A moment’s pause, and then, quick as a flash of lightning, Baden-Powell had gripped him, and had, moreover, got hold of the gun he was carrying.  Then the patrol came up, the Ashanti was pinned, and, as B.-P. concludes the narrative, “a handsome knife in a leopard-skin scabbard was added to our spoil.”

After the palace had been searched and the whole of the fetish village had been burned to the ground, Prempeh, with B.-P. to look after him, set out for Cape Coast Castle.  The bitterness to a soldier of that return journey, without a shot having been fired, can hardly be imagined by a civilian, and would certainly be strongly reprehended by those who regard the justest war with horror and aversion.  The soldiers had set out on that dreadful march through swamp, and bush, and forest, to fight and bring to the dust a cruel bloodthirsty nation of savages, contemptuously described by Baden-Powell as “the bully tribe” of the Gold Coast Hinterland.  Instead of finding the bully as willing to fight as Cuff was willing to face dear old Dobbin, B.-P. found a cowering, cringing enemy, willing to lick the dust and abase himself in any manner the ingenious white man might suggest.  So it was with no feelings of elation that the man who had received the pink flimsy ordering him on active service, who had raised and organised the Native Levy, who had cut a road through the bush and forest, draining roads and bridging streams,—­turned his back on Kumassi, and marched King Prempeh to the Cape coast.  This march of 150 miles was accomplished in seven days.  Of this expedition B.-P. recalls “ten minutes’ genuine fun,”—­that was when a doctor was cutting out from under his toe-nail the eggs of an insect called the jigger, rude enough to make a nest of B.-P.’s big toe.  It is such incidents as these that live in the soldier’s mind after a hard campaign.

During the whole of these tiresome operations B.-P. of course was hard at work sketching and keeping his diary.  He added to his wonderful store of experiences, and had the rare delight of seeing the King of Bekwai “oblige with a few steps”—­specially in his honour.  But the story of his work—­and it is the same with all the quiet work done by servants of the Queen in every part of the Empire—­attracted little public notice, and the man-in-the-street had no more idea of B.-P.’s service than the man-in-the-moon.  At that time, indeed, few people outside official circles had ever heard of his name, and certainly no stationer would have been mad enough to stick B.-P.’s photograph in his window.  Whether Baden-Powell, when he awakes to it, will prefer his present fame to the happy obscurity of those distant days, is a subject for speculation.  I could say definitely, if I chose, which condition is preferred by the proud mother of as gallant a son as ever rode horse into the African desert.